Every Stephen King Movie That Connects to ‘The Dark Tower’

This week’s The Dark Tower starring Idris Elba and Matthew McConaughey is the first big-budget adaptation of a Stephen King novel in a while, but King’s books and short stories have inspired more than 30 years of great horror, sci-fi, and drama films. Even as The Dark Tower is designed to launch a new franchise based on King’s epic fantasy series, the film is littered with references, homages, and Easter eggs to previous King novels - and to the movies they spawned. In this new video from ScreenCrush’s Britt Hayes and Ryan Arey, we connect all the dots between The Dark Tower and the long history of Stephen King cinema.

If you’ve seen The Dark Tower trailer, you probably spotted a few of the Easter eggs already; there’s a photograph of the Overlook Hotel, for example, and we all know that haunted place as the location of King’s immortal classic The Shining. But there are way more connections (and way more obscure connections) than you probably ever realized. Even though these movies were made by different directors and different companies over a matter of decades, combined they create an accidental Stephen King cinematic universe. And that’s really cool.

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